esolved, that we view with detestation every attempt to silence the FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, by a system of terror and proscription.
                                                                                       ~Alexander Contee Hanson

A Federalist printer in the Democratic-Republican city of Baltimore, Hanson's editorializing against the War of 1812 had provoked what one historian has called “probably the most terrifying and brutal riot in the young nation' s history up to that time.”1

The Beginning
Tired of his tirades against President Madison, and his accusations of French infiltration into the United States government, a small crowd of Democratic-Republicans had torn down Hanson's printing shop on a warm June night. Advisedly fleeing the city, Hanson reestablihed his paper in Georgetown. Convinced that his rights had been severely denied, he made secret plans to re-enter Baltimore on the evening of 26 July 1812. Expecting opposition, Hanson and his defenders arrived at their residence armed. While Hanson expected civil unrest, the extent of violence visited upon people and property indiscriminately that evening by a large angry mob shocked Federalists and Democratic Republicans alike.

Senseless Brutality: Interpretations of the Riot
The senseless brutality of the Baltimore Riot challenges the traditional narrative of an America society governed by rational debates culminating in publicly sanctioned laws. The passionate reaction of the Baltimore Riot calls attention to a theme of paranoia and violent reaction that accompanied America' s push towards democratic maturity. This paper seeks to insert itself within the current political and cultural debate over the nature of the public sphere2 and what this nature reveals about the development of America' s broadening political culture.

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Interpretations of the Public Sphere
Current historiography has defined the public sphere as facilitating the democratization of political participation through “rational discourses”3—be it print centered or ritual centered. For example, Christopher Grasso's A Speaking Aristocracy argues that due to increasing discussion in the public sphere the Federalists had to transform their political approach. While they had traditionally expected political support because of their position in society, increasingly they learned they had to engage in persuasive appeals that debated with, even courted the common man. Thus rational discourse in the public sphere challenged rule based solely on rank. Newspapers in the Early Republic increasingly broadened communication, which in turn widened political participation. The Baltimore Riot shows the real limitations of the public sphere as a ” tool of democratization.

This paper seeks to balance the emphasis on rational discourses in the Early Republic by noting the irrationality, hysteria, and paranoia that also existed and influenced the life of the young nation. By focusing upon Alexander Contee Hanson and his newspaper, I am arguing that by nature the public sphere lacked consistent coherence, unity, and at times, the rationality needed to resolve political tensions. The Baltimore Riot of 1812 in response to Alexander Contee Hanson's Federal Republican, reveals that though rational discourse in print media was seeking to establish itself as a democratizing force in society, it remained subject to the irrationality of passions, triggered by unresolved tensions over the nature of society and government in the young United States. 

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The Public Sphere Explored
The stage that housed the actors and actions of the Baltimore Riot has been described as the “public sphere”—the arena where individuals funneled their identities into one organization aimed at influencing political life. An eighteenth century development, the public sphere emerged as the corresponding increase in political participation and media connected and energized individuals to use their collective power to influence politics. Understanding the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through this paradigm answered such questions as: How did the events in the taverns and on the street corners, relate to law making in eighteenth century America? The main architect behind such a construction, Jurgen Habermas “sketched the eighteen-century emergence of a zone of rational discourse in the association and print, mediating between the monarchical state and the 'lifeworld' of society.”4 His philosophical framework, while often adjusted by historians, was generally welcomed as unifying multiple layers of life during the Revolution and Early Republic.

The Public Sphere in Cultural and Political History
Habermas' theory further represents a unique joining of two divergent fields. On the one hand, cultural historians along with anthropologists and literary scholars have within the last half-century turned their attention to finding paradigms that illuminated language, symbolic actions, and behaviors as historical agents. By citing the existence of a “public” influencing print and social rituals—such as parades, clubs, societies, etc.—Habermas bestowed causal power to language and culture.

While Habermas excited cultural historians with a paradigm that empowered their primary field of study, he also pulled these historians into a conversation with political historians. Political historians must confront Habermas, for he argued that the actions that occurred within the walls of government were legitimated by the consensus within the public sphere. The public sphere thus provided historians focusing on different aspects of society the necessary framework for making broader connections between both methodology and historical content. In commenting on the significance of this concept, John Brooke noted, “The Habermasian public sphere thus served the critical function of helping historians to organize, discuss, and assess the dimension of 'culture' with an eye toward the power relations in society usually bundled together simply as 'politics'.”5 Pulling these fields into conversation, Habermas reinforced the complexity and interactivity of historical causation, while also providing a manageable framework from which to describe the political and cultural events of early America.

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The "Rational" Public Sphere
Habermas' paradigm emphasizes rationality of discourse. Such a discourse arose as the breakdown of church and state in the Reformation and the separation of society into sacred v. secular, and private v. public in the Enlightenment unleashed debate over the intersection of the governed and the governing. With the French Revolution following on the heals of the American, collectively individuals demanded the right of ” supervision over government, a supervision often conducted through the medium of the burgeoning newspaper culture.6 “'Newspapers changed from mere institutions for the publication of news into bearers and leaders of public opinionóweapons of party politics... [F]or the newspaper publisher [this]... meant that he changed from a vendor of recent news to a dealer in public opinion.'”7

It is important to note that the dual emphasis upon an “ideal speech community and an ideal speech event, which intimate situations of perfect communication between parties and unlimited opportunities for the resolution of deliberation,” obscured tensions arising as the nation sought to define it's existence.8

Today, this concept of the rationality of public discourse remains the focus of a number of historical monographs. As historians have applied this paradigm to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America, they have tended to obscure an irrational stream of discourse and ritual within America's printing culture. Evaluating the Federal Republican and its role in triggering the Baltimore Riot of 1812 as a part of the public sphere challenges Habermas's assertion that this sphere be solely rational. Hanson's paper and Baltimore's riot highlight the breakdown of rational discourse within the public sphere.

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The Physical Public Sphere
So what did the physical public sphere look like? Socially and culturally Baltimore was expanding. With an influx of immigrants from those of Irish origin to French came new competition over jobs and city expansion. The population expanded widely, doubling in the period 1800 to 1820.9 The number of free blacks jumped radically, from just 3,771 in 1800 to 10, 047 in 1820.10 Religious differences abounded as city records note the existence of Episcopalians, Catholics, Presbyterians, First German Reformed, Quaker, and Methodist.11 Further, the hostilities between France, England, and the United States continued to create unrest as embargos and impressments stifled the maritime industry of the port city. As well, in the public sphere, where information was exchanged and debated, transitions from an oral culture dependent upon spoken rhetoric to a more print centered culture began to occur.12 Newspapers, such as the Federal Republican or the democratically led, Whig, began emerging and the debates that previously had been restricted to those few men of letters, now engulfed the crowds in the taverns and city square.

The consensus and homogeneity previously enjoyed by the inhabitants of Baltimore was crumbling and the tensions that emerged erupted against Hanson. One historian noted about the period, “but there is no period in American history in which fundamental change proceeded with greater power, speed, and effect than in this most obscure of periods.”13 Rising tensions meant that the public sphere was even less equipped to forge consensus, restrain passion and resolve disputes. While Baltimore's growing urbanization and political unrest contextualize its eruption into chaos, analyzing Hanson and his Federal Republican contributes to our understanding of the existence of streams of paranoia and passion in the public sphere. Analyzing Hanson's paper, his involvement in the Washington Benevolent Society, and the 1812 riot underscores the heated nature of politics during the war of 1812 and the very limited nature of rhetoric within the public sphere.

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1 Frank A. Cassell, ” “The Great Baltimore Riot of 1812,” Maryland Historical Magazine 70.3 (1975): 241-242.

2 In this paper, the term public sphere is based upon Jurgen Habermas's definition as provided originally in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and then further refined in his latest work, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) . In article based on his first book, (The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964) , trans. by Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique) , Issue 3 (Autumn, 1974) , 49.) , Habermas defines the public sphere as ” a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed.

3 By rational or rationality, I mean that which is reasonable and understandable, not characterized by extremism or excess. In the context of the Early Republic's public sphere, this means expression that was discernibly directed by explainable thought and or action.

4 John L. Brooke, “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historian,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXIX:1 (Summer, 1998) , 44.

5 Brooke, “Reason and Passion,” 45.

6 Habermas, “The Public Sphere,” 53.

7 Habermas, “The Public Sphere,” 53.

8 Brooke, “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere,” 63.

9 Baltimore City's population in 1800 was 20,900. In 1820 it numbered 47, 602. From: Whitman H. Ridgway, Community Leadership in Maryland, 1790-1840: A Comparative Analysis of Power in Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979) , 210.

10 Ridgway, Community Leadership in Maryland, 211.

11 Ridgway, Community Leadership in Maryland, 234-35.

12 Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 4.

13 David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservativism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1965), introduction.

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